Lenovo announces 12.1-inch, Ion-powered netbook

Nvidia's MCP79 chipset has been on quite a journey. After debuting in Apple's MacBooks last year, it started playing together with Intel's Atom processors, and we later found it in Acer's AspireRevo nettop under a new identity: Ion. The journey isn't over, because Lenovo has now announced a cheap little laptop based on the Atom-Ion combo.

The Lenovo IdeaPad S12 has a 12.1" display with a 1280x800 resolution, and Lenovo intends to offer it with a choice of either Intel GMA 950 or Nvidia Ion integrated graphics. The latter will boost the asking price by $50. Nvidia says the Ion is powerful enough to propel the S12 into the full-blown "notebook" category, but Lenovo is more conservative, calling the system a plain netbook. Semantics geeks can pick a side after looking at Lenovo's "draft specs" list:

(For the metrically challenged, the IdeaPad S12 weighs either 3.09 or 3.42 lbs depending on the battery size, and it measures a slender 11.5" x 8.5" x 0.87-1.14".)

According to Lenovo's press release, the Intel-only flavor of the IdeaPad S12 will become available next month at $449. You'll have to wait until "later this summer" to get the pricier Ion-based version, which will add an HDMI output and superior graphics capabilities.

The Ion IGP should let you play casual games and some high-definition video content smoothly on the S12, but don't expect any miracles—the Atom still constitutes a relatively tight bottleneck for more demanding applications. Our tests have shown the Atom-Ion duo chokes on titles like Half-Life 2, Quake Wars, and Call of Duty 4 even at low resolutions and detail levels. Nevertheless, the Ion can run many more games than the Intel chipset, and it can speed up select non-gaming tasks by offloading general-purpose processing from the CPU.